While I completely understand the legalities of this contracting process (now that I’m temporarily working in an acquisitions-related job), I’m not sure how this would be carried out in practice. For example, if FN has a regular source for barrels, or if they make / finish them themselves, do they have to use a different supplier or deliberately modify their design and/or tooling in order to make the barrel “out of spec?” When they order / produce internal fire control parts, do they deliberately use a source that is out of MILSPEC, do they skip the quality control steps required by the TDP so the parts aren’t “certified” as MILSPEC, or do they, again, deliberately modify the design of the parts so that they don’t comply with the TDP. All this seems pretty impractical and inefficient from a manufacturing standpoint.
As of November 2013, The Army has officially contracted to FN for the M4A1.
February 2013:
FN Manufacturing has outbid Remington Arms Company and Colt Defense LLC., to win a contract worth just under $77 million to make M4A1s for the U.S. Army, according to an industry source. The award notice was posted on Federal Business Opportunities on Feb. 22 with an initial value of $9,370,615.
This is the latest round in what has become a hard-fought battle to equip soldiers with a better carbine.
The drama all began when the Army chose Remington over Colt, the original maker of the M4, last April to make 120,000 M4s and M4A1 carbines. That award meant that more soldiers would go into combat with the M4A1, a SOF version of the carbine that features a more durable barrel and a full-auto trigger. The Army’s decision to dump the three-round burst setting will give soldiers a more consistent trigger and better accuracy.
The GAO did rule in favor of Colt’s first protest over the Army’s miscalculation of royalties it would receive for contract awards on its M4 design. The July 24 ruling forced the Army to rework the original solicitation so the vendors that fell into the competitive range could submit new price bids. All gun makers involved were forced to reveal their previous price bids for the original $84 million contract to keep things fair.
Colt officials then filed an Oct. 9 protest with the GAO three weeks after the Connecticut-based gun maker received the Army’s amended Sept. 21 solicitation. The GAO denied Colt’s second protest in a Nov. 16 decision.
This latest decision makes FN the only maker of both M16A4s and M4 carbine variants for the U.S. Military (I think.) The majority of the contract will supply M4A1s to the Army as part of its ongoing effort to upgrade its fleet of M4s.
FN already has the TDP and sole production for the M16A2, A3, and A4. As of July 1, 2009, the U.S. Army owns the rights to the M4 and the M4 TDP since Colt lost them in June 2009.
Colt lost sole source, but they still own the TDP and the terms bellow still apply.
As of July 1/09, the sole source clause of the “M4 Addendum” expired, allowing the Army to second source production of the M4/M4A1 carbines and their unique parts. Under the terms of the licensing agreement, however, the M4 TDP remains Colt proprietary data. Those terms also state that the US Army would have to pay 5% in royalties to Colt, for every M4/M4A1 carbine and/or their unique parts procured from second sources, for another 26 years – through Dec 24/37.
Second source contractors will also be required to sign non-disclosure agreements, just as they do for the M16. The non-disclosure/ non-use agreements for accessing the TDP will forbid the other companies from using Colt’s proprietary data for commercial sales. Once the second-source vendor’s military contract ends, the company will be required to be destroy all of the TDP information provided to them.
So yes, FN has a copy of the TDP as part of their contract but from everything I’ve read they are not allowed to use it to build commercial rifles, only for their military contract.
Thanks for the comment. To the best of your knowledge, are these military collector rifles exactly the same as the military rifles, sans the lower and fcg? Also, can you confirm lower markings? Thanks!
I have written an e-mail to FNH USA to answer a lot of concerns addressed here. Hopefully, I will have an answer back next week. I would like to put an end to all of the speculations, assumptions, and misinformation. I will post again when I get an answer.
The lower has the military style roll mark except being marked “FN MFG Columbia, SC” it was marked “FNH-USA” in the area above the trigger.
I can’t comment on anything that goes into the production of the product; way above my paygrade. Renegade04 has written to FNH-USA so we will just have to wait and see what they say. It’s hard to judge a pre-release of a product based on a picture and it looked like the one at the NRA show was behind glass for some reason. I’m sure that once they have a production product ready better pics and info will be released.
FN can build a commercial M4, but they cannot build it using their military parts, it’s part of their agreement to use the tdp (owned by Colt) to build military rifles. This is likely the reason that their earlier run of civilian rifles did not use military parts. I’m not a Colt elitist, just trying to combat some of the misinformation in this thread. Unfortunately there’s about a snowball’s chance in hell that these new FN civilian versions use the same parts that they use in their military versions.
This is the equivalent of saying race car drivers should drive Fords instead of Ferraris because they have been making cars for 100 years and produce more cars in a year than Ferrari has ever.
Ferrari makes their own parts that are unique to the car itself which they have designed. BCM cherry picks parts made from other producers and puts together decent and affordable rifles of one specific design. FNH has been in the business of making hard use military guns for over a century and they own millions of dollars of state of the art manufacturing equipment and employ gunsmiths and weapons designers/engineers with decades of experience. How much more clear can I be? If you think a BCM gun has better parts and QC than a FN gun commercial or military, you are ****in insane.
Ferrari? I understand that you’re trying to make a point here with some hyperbole… But really? More like BCM makes the Eddie Bauer model of the Explorer (or whatever special edition of an otherwise off the shelf car) and FN makes the entire Ford line.
I don’t think anyone is saying BCM is bad by any stretch, and obviously quality assurance during assembly makes a difference (else every shitty build-when-Brownells-drop-ships company would be awesome). But they aren’t a bigassed international weapons engineering and manufacturing facility with millions and millions in government contracts worldwide across a wide variety of systems.
Regarding if these are FN parts? Well, I suppose we’ll see. If you do a search here you’ll find plenty of claims that FN would never make an AR barrel for the same reason (and yes, I know that ‘technically’ they aren’t AR barrels) with denials and calls of bullshit when they were first released.
Wouldn’t be hard to simply source some parts from someone else who does follow TDP, or perhaps there could be another way. Or maybe it’s all CMT (or Olympic or Hesse or worse… Wait, is there a worse example than Hesse? ) As stated, we’ll see.
Would I buy an FN over Colt? For reasons of nostalgia and prior unavailability, absolutely. Judging from the number of friends who have called me up talking my ear off about them there are plenty of others who feel the same way.
I imagine that if both had been available for a long time it’d just be a coin flip.
I suppose there’s also the chance FN could just go Walmart with it… That is, make them with their own TDP parts, deny it, and then tie it up in court forever if it’s pursued. Colt isn’t exactly in a phenomenal financial situation right now.
Why wouldn’t FN use the same parts in the both rifles? It doesn’t make finance sense not to. All parts have a dimensional max and minimum. How could they prove it is the same drawing?
I feel like trying to avoid use of TDP parts wouldn’t exactly be practical. That’s like saying “here’s the instructions on how to change a car tire, or bake a cake, now, change a tire or bake a cake without using any knowledge gained from reading that!”. Also, if companies like BCM or Daniel Defense’s AR offerings are Mil-Spec/follow the TDP without being sued by Colt, I feel like it would be hard for Colt to go after FN for producing similar firearm, contract or not.
As has been said before in threads about the TDP, BCM, DD, etc aren’t being sued by Colt because they never signed the agreement that was part and parcel to the TDP as part of the military contract. Their knowledge of the TDP comes from reverse engineering, destructive and nondestructive testing, and possibly the TDP itself sans any contracts (it’s easy to get if you try). This is not the case for most military manufacturers, who had to take the poison pill along with the .mil contract.
And also has been said before, FN is already using non-TDP parts at first glance (receiver extension). Sure, it wouldn’t make sense to set up a different line of parts, but they already have according to reports in this thread. The rifle obviously isn’t the same as the .mil version sans FCG/selector.
I don’t know if what’s been said in this thread is accurate, but it wouldn’t work that way. We’re not taking about something like patent law, we’re talking about privity of contract. BCM, DD, and others didn’t sign the contract, so Colt can’t go after them.
) As stated, we’ll see.